Up to 60% Off at Sephora.com’s Memorial Day Sale!
Up to 70% off Lorac, MAC, Urban Decay and more at nordstromrack.com.
Up to 50% Off Urban Decay, Flower Beauty, and more at Ulta.com.
Up to 60% Off MAC, Anastasia Beverly Hills, and more at nordstrom.com.
Up to 60% Off MAC, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Lancome, and more at macys.com.

Beauty Abroad

Makeup Reviews

Bath & Body

Skincare

Farewell Google Reader, You’ve Been a Great Friend

It really shouldn’t be any surprised that Google axed Google Reader yesterday. Granted you’ll have use of it up until July but after that you can wave good-bye to a very old and dear friend.

It’s VERY unfortunate they choose to do this and it really shouldn’t come as any surprise considering the Feedburner fiasco a few short months ago (I won’t get into the possibility of Feedburner disappearing at some point from the US as this is a post about Google Reader).

Google has become more and more of a marketing tool and that’s an unfortunate event. I imagine their logic behind closing down Google Reader is to get people to move towards Google+ which hasn’t quite taken off as much as they’d like. Forcing people to follow their favorite blogs and sites via Google+ is a hope that it will somehow at some point become an industry standard I guess but Twitter kinda has the market share here.

But I digress because if I get into Authorship, Google Panda Updates, and axing such great services such as Feedburner and Google Reader I’ll have your ear all damn day.

The moral of this story is before long you’ll have to start exporting your RSS and followings to a new reader. Discussions of Feedly and other readers are on the horizon but courtesy a reader’s tweet today I’d like to direct you to www.theoldreader.com.

It’s early I know, you’re thinking I still have until July to make the change, but please do start shopping a new reader before that time. Google allows you to easily download an archive of your feeds and if you decide to go with Old Reader you can easily import the list (most other reader’s will let you do the same).

I offer my comfort to you while we mourn this great Google feature. It’s unfortunate the Google of yesteryear is more about marketing than the user experience and the small fries.

P.S. Please keep in mind Old Reader is getting hit hard today as are other RSS sites so if importing doesn’t work at first just give it a second as the Internet is chaotic today after the news of Google Reader’s demise hit.

Comments

sigh same here I rely on it heavily and use it daily. Oldreader is shaping up to be an excellent pick though, basic, to the point RSS following. no frills, no bells, no whistles, exactly what I wanted as a replacement.

I like TheOldReader. The only problem I’ve noticed with it so far is that I have to manually make my feeds update. But that could be explained away by high rates of traffic. It was working great last night when I tried it.

I checked out feedly and after futzing with it for a good while I decided that it was too complicated for my liking.

My biggest fear right now is that google will somehow make feedburner go away. :< Every time I get fully entrenched into something awesome they provide, Google takes it away from me. (Google Wave, Goog411 etc, etc)

They confirm that they’ve been swamped with traffic..Their users tripled overnight! Currently, they’re working on deploying more capacity; according to the blog we should see smoother sailing tonight. They’ve got big plans for the next three months to make sure that they’re going to be ready when google reader finally goes down.

Thankfully, they have plans to remain free, but since people are insisting they take some money, they’re going to be offering a slightly more advanced version for paid users, however they have no plans to have bombard us with ads. 🙂

ha! I owe you BIG time 😀 I was hunting out reader’s last night and was SO pleased when you recommended this! No nonsense, no frills, exactly what I want in a reader ;-D I really worry about the future of feedburner. After taking it over they have put absolutely no effort into it which doesn’t bode well for its future 🙁 It’s already been axed in Asia so I’m scared the same will happen in the US at some point!

You’re totally welcome. I went on a hunt last night and couldn’t find much of anything I liked. I tried feedly, but it kept crashing on me and once I did get it working I found the interface really cluttered and yucky. I read far too many blogs to deal with an overly dynamic format.

Luckily I stumbled on that reddit comment.

I use feedburner for my blog and I know tons of other blogs besides this wonderful one use it. It’s so simple and easy. I love google, I love their innovation and the way they run their company. I just hate how they pull out of a service once they’ve got a good following. I didn’t realize they’d axed feedburner in Asia all ready…I hope that’s not a sign.

feedly has always had a crappy interface 🙁 so glad you tweeted me this! Yeah they did, back in October 🙁 I do worry about the future of it here in the US. It would be a shame to lose readers that follow via feedburner! crap!

I’m so sad, I follow way to many blogs to try and remember them all! Luckily I think some bloggers (like you!) are on either facebook or google so I’m partly covered there. I’m not sure if I should just remember what I look at, or try and move everything over to a different reader.

Disappointing to hear they’re getting rid of google reader especially since they’re also getting rid of igoogle which is my awesomely convenient homepage that has twitter, google reader etc on it. I’m glad to hear there is an alternative and I’m super awesomely glad you mentioned it here because I likely would never have even heard of it 🙂

Ugh. I am so disappointed by this. In fact I will boycott google+ b/c I hate being forced into crap like that. I use Flipboard on my ipad and it is connected to googl reader soooo……?idkwhat I’m gonna do. Guess ll go check out old reader. Sigh. 🙂

This is just devastating for me. I follow HUNDREDS of blogs and sites through Google Reader and have been doing so for… as long as I can remember! I tried Feedly out briefly but it just didn’t tickle my fancy. I am shopping around but half-heartedly. So sad.

Very sad indeed. Problem is I have a lot of tagged posts and I haven’t found a reader that import those tags. It was easy to search for tagged posts like products I wanted to try, for exemple (many of your posts are tagged :D). It’s a shame.

I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but I never really like Google Reader 😡 I tried to switch over to it a couple of times, but for some reason I never liked using it. Bloglines is my RSS reader of choice; I’ve been using it since 2007. It’s practically my best friend at this point 😀

I don’t use Google Reader, but I use my Blogger Dashboard to follow blogs, and a couple I read on there are imported FROM Google reader. Do you know if the change is going to affect the Blogger Dashboard? I feel like as a self-proclaimed geek I should know this but… 🙁

I’m so mystified by the direction Google is taking these days. I hadn’t thought about this being designed to push people toward Google+, but that’s the only thing that makes sense. And yet, why do they keep beating that dead horse? They’ve lost track of the things Google used to be great at in their attempt to outperform Twitter, Facebook, etc., which IMO is never going to happen.

I believe everything with Google comes down to AdWords revenue. They may be panicking because to my knowledge, ALL ad networks are really suffering right now. (Worst Q1 I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been blogging for 8 years.)

that’s my theory, they want people to utilize google+ more and honestly axing google reader might just push a few people towards it maybe?! exactly…..! just be yourself and stop being like everyone else. yeah, but typically ad sales are ALWAYS the worst in Jan/Feb. I think we’ll see pick up the rest of Spring into Summer.

I’m with you, I hate seeing google reader go in favor of something that’s entirely social. I mean I can’t live without facebook but my feeds are something I like to keep private, and I like to be able to read in offline mode because I can read while on the plane, or the like.

The other problem with Google and the need to switch over to google+ is how difficult it is to keep things private. Which concerns me.

For example when I first got a smartphone I decided to check out G+, next thing I knew all of my pictures were being synced to my G+ account, including pictures from my mother’s memorial service that I didn’t want on the internet! It’s almost as if Google believes that we couldn’t possibly want private lives because of the sheer amount people do share on the internet.

I figured out how to do it in the long run and eventually take them down, but that kind of information still gets backed up on servers. :< I don't think it's right of google to try and sync all of our information together, even stuff we want to keep private.

I’m right there with you. I had a photo from blogger that had me holding a fake pistol -it was an airsoft gun the kind that shoots tiny plastic pellets. If you took the time to read the post it was about photomanipulation and editing and the pistol with its orange end cap was the perfect example to use.

A year later I found out it was on G+ when a teacher posted it in class and then used it as material to humiliate me by making it sound like I was a violent maniac. He found it through a simple google search of my name.